Are Twitter shares going up or coming down?

A bombsell may be hidden in my psychological analysis of Twitter today. Why? Because of Twitter’s new Application Programming Interface (API). CEO Costolo’s decision-making process did it wrong again. His decided to introduce this major business changing model to Twitter appearing to me as a desperate Kahneman System 1 heuristic decision in a complicated psychological area of information processing where there is not enough research data to show what the public will do to a company that makes it more difficult rather than easier to connect. Introducing a restrictive Application Programming Interface that will require tweets to be all Twitter’s or forcing you to go through an app that may or may not allow you to add data in your tweet from other sources (Imagine being unable to readily tweet because you added a picture of your kid from Instagram).

The world of electronic communication is cluttered with too many new rules, umpteen mini commercials on social media sites, ID requirements, passwords needed around every computer corner, and more and more minds that are becoming less and less curious about even personal messages. Piaget is losing the battle of enticing people to seek information by giving out a “teaser” sentence, e.g., “Your wife left an important message… You can find out by joining this retail website.” Dr. Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking fast and slow says about people, “They tend to be lazy.” Do you think Twitter’s API will streamline tweeting or restrict the flow? If 50% of tweeters quit, you’ll see it in your next quarter’s earning’s loss. People won’t tweet because they can’t effortlessly attach external data to the tweet, that is my psychological analysis. They will quit tweeting, what will Twitter do then? Go back to R&D for something else to beat the market? There are 2 type of CEO attitudes, the one that makes naturally System 2 decisions to grow and the one that bullies itself into the market with System 1 decisions. Guess who is who?

Monday, October 27 is the day you will know that Twitter shares gained a penny or two more than analysts expected. The fourth quarter will be a bit better than the third that was a bit better than the second. This is a snail parade for the eternal optimists that catapulted Twitter to $50 per share on loses of $2.40 per quarter. This is not my first blogging on Twitter. I don’t like to say it but the internet is getting less free. You can’t read anything today without a requirement to joining something.

Interesting that I just received an email from a friend. The email said, “You have to join the website free to get your friend’s message.” Needless to say I deleted the message from my friend without opening it. My curiosity level has reached zero. How about you? I know that most of my friends still will join something to get the picture of the kid on a tweet or to find out what a friend wrote in an email. Not me, I am happy with Facebook and Google that keep my social life easy.